Biostar has GeForce 7050 mobo

Author: Tim Smalley
Published: 5th June 2007
Comments (6) Stumble
Biostar has GeForce 7050 mobo

Biostar's TForce 7050-M7 board comes with an integrated HDMI port that's full HDCP enabled.

When we popped along to Biostar's suite today, the company had what looks to be a "close to final" GeForce 7050 / nForce 630i motherboard.

Boards based on Nvidia's latest integrated chipset for Intel processors were initially showed off at this year's CeBIT trade show, but due to some problems with audio passing over HDMI, the silicon had to go for a respin.

It looks like that silicon is finally back and the boards are almost ready for retail - Biostar said that its board would be shipping "very soon", with boards arriving in the US within a month. Pricing hasn't been confirmed, yet but we'll endeavour to get that before the product launches.

On the features front, this board is undoubtedly aimed at the media centre enthusiast, which is largely thanks to its mATX form factor and the integrated GeForce 7-series graphics chipset. The board also supports all current Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad and Pentium D processors (we're assuming Core 2 Extreme CPUs are supported too) and up to 4GB of DDR2-800 memory.

The IGP comes complete with PureVideo HD technology, meaning you can playback HD DVD and Blu-ray movies with respectable CPU usage, although it's the older GeForce 7-series video decoding technology and not what Nvidia recently introduced with its mid-range GeForce 8-series products.

Interestingly, the HDCP crypto-ROM isn't embedded in the chipset and the motherboard vendors have to implement this themselves. We're still of the opinion that it's about time all GPUs and graphics cards were HDCP enabled by default - ATI has listened and delivered on that front, but Nvidia still continues down the rather confusing path of making it compulsory on higher end GPUs and optional on the lower-end products that are more likely to be used for video playback.

Connectivity wise, there is a pretty impressive selection, including four SATA 3Gbps ports (supporting RAID 0, 1, 5 and 0+1), Gigabit Ethernet, up to 10 USB 2.0 ports, eight-channel high-definition audio, HDMI, VGA, DVI and S-Video. Finally, there's also a pair of PCI slots, along with single PCIe x16 and PCIe x1 slots. We'll leave you with a shot of the board...

Discuss in the forums.

Quote devdevil85 5th June 2007, 19:56
Do enthusiast boards come with PCI slots, old Serial/Parallel connections or PS2 mouse/keyboard slots anymore because I can't stand having those in brand new boards. I wish they would just disappear. Who in the heck is going to buy a $300 mobo and put who knows how much money into a gaming rig and still use them. I think it's just wasted space/resources and they should stop including them. Also, what happened to UEFI? Is that being implemented by any of the motherboard manufacturers into their current/future products? because if I remember correctly, UEFI was supposed to be implemented by late 2007. Thanks Tim for the updates...I'm really enjoying this....
Quote DarkLord7854 5th June 2007, 21:14
Is it me or does it look like they removed 2 memory slots? O.o
Quote BUFF 5th June 2007, 22:01
abit's 2 7050 mobos are supposed to be in UK shops next week.
Quote Tulatin 6th June 2007, 01:22
Layout is a bit poor imo, and yeah they did remove 2 memory slots. Beyond that, wtf is with them using an AM2 heatsink mount with an LGA775 board. I bet there'll be at least a few miffed customers when they find out that their stock sinks won't work.
Quote Meanmotion 6th June 2007, 01:25
Quote:
Originally Posted by devdevil85
Stuff.

Totally agree with you about the legacy connectors, there's just no need.

As for UEFI, it won't be around for several years yet. Vista doesn't support it and, because there's no end user advantage, development isn't being pushed.
Quote BUFF 6th June 2007, 14:05
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tulatin
Beyond that, wtf is with them using an AM2 heatsink mount with an LGA775 board.
perhaps they took 1 of their existing 7050 AM2 mobos & slapped an LGA775 socket on it for the show as a concept?
afaik the Intel version of that chipset isn't due until significantly later in the year.
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